


(in)voluntary response

by ivoryandhorn



Category: Naruto
Genre: 1000-3000 words, Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-26
Updated: 2010-05-26
Packaged: 2017-10-12 08:50:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/123088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivoryandhorn/pseuds/ivoryandhorn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU. Two boys met one night by the Nakano River. Only one walked away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(in)voluntary response

**Author's Note:**

> I swear, the next thing I write involving these boys is going to be happy fun times or else.

In the end, he should have known that he'd never be able to kill his best friend, though Itachi apparently had no such compunction about doing the same. Everyone had a line, and Shisui's was right here: the weight on his back holding him under the Nakano's surface, his arms flailing at weeds and stirring up silt. So he'd failed his mission, okay. Given his previous winning streak, he'd probably been bucking for a colossal fuck-up sooner or later anyway. Though, for all the things for Shisui to fail at, he was glad it had been this.

But apparently his eyes hadn't gotten the message, because the more he burned for air, the more his chakra seethed, throwing itself against whatever Itachi had done to its flow—and then it broke through, with a feeling like his eyeballs were being burned out of their sockets, nothing but power. The pressure lifted abruptly and Shisui reared up out of the river, gasping for air. He looked around wildly, but Itachi wasn't anywhere near him anymore. He was sprawled in the grass that bracketed the Nakano's flow, limbs scattered over the ground.

Shisui squinted at him for a moment, at the familiar movements of his body, before they clicked with a feeling like the bottom of his stomach had just dropped out. No, no no no—he scrambled out of the river, panting, to crouch helplessly at Itachi's side. On the grass before him, Itachi's body jerked wildly, legs flailing and hands scrabbling at the air just in front of his throat. His eyes were huge, mouth clamped shut against an invisible tide.

"You not drowning," Shisui gasped, grabbing Itachi by the shoulders, "you can't be, there's no water—" but Itachi didn't respond, eyes fixed on some point past Shisui's left ear. He switched his grip and grabbed Itachi's face in his hands instead, staring deep into his eyes, trying to undo what he'd done, to take it back—but it was too late, too late, too goddamn motherfucking late, his eyes were spent, and all they had to offer him now was a feeble fizzle. "You're not drowning!" he screamed. "Itachi, please, listen to me—you're not—fucking _listen,_ you have to hear me—"

Even as the words fell out of his mouth he knew they were useless. Wherever the Doryoku had thrown Itachi, it was beyond the reach of Shisui's voice. Whose hands did he see around his throat? His? His own? "Please," Shisui pleaded, as Itachi's slight body shuddered its way through cardiac arrest. "You're not drowning, you're not, you can't—" Itachi went limp, and Shisui kept up the chant as he searched desperately for signs of a pulse—throat, wrist, heart, breath, anything. Nothing. "Itachi, it wasn't—not like this, it wasn't—you weren't supposed to be the one who _died…"_

He didn't know how long he stayed there, shivering in his river-soaked clothes and hunched over Itachi's limp body. This was wrong, all wrong, it was all—he pulled himself together. He pulled out paper and pencil with shaking fingers, trying to think of what Itachi would have written in a suicide note. But his mind was blank; once, he would have scribbled something down in a triumphant flourish without thinking, but could he say that he really knew Itachi now? Once, he also would have said Itachi would never betray the clan. Once, he would have said that nothing could ever come between them. Now—

On his first attempt, his hand was shaking so badly that what came out of his pencil barely looked like writing at all. On his second attempt he pressed too hard, and the tip of his pencil tore through the paper and bit deep into his thigh, a sharp and sudden pain like a kunai slipped between his ribs. Shisui wished fervently that it _was_ a kunai he held in his hand—something he could use to turn himself inside out, rip out all the guts and blood and bones of himself to heap over Itachi's still body like an offering: take me, give him back, treason be damned, clan be damned, everything, everything be damned.

Instead, he made a third attempt. This time something that looked enough like Itachi's handwriting to pass in an okay light emerged. It wasn't as good an imitation as it could have been, but the perfectionist in Shisui was drowning under the howl of his guilt and shame. He almost wished the clan _would_ take him in for Itachi's murder, take him in and execute him, because he didn't know how he was going to live with himself after watching Itachi drown on dry air. They wouldn't, though, and the knowledge tore at him like hooks.

Shisui pinned the note to the bridge and scooped up river-smooth pebbles to stuff Itachi's pockets with. Then he took up Itachi's body—oh god, he was so light, he was just a kid, they were both just kids, and it was all his fault, his fault, his fault—and tipped it into the Nakano River.

"I'm so sorry," he whispered. "Sorry, sorry, sorry, I—"

But of course, there was no one left to hear.

\---

  
The funeral was mostly awkward. Everyone looked stunned. Well, anyone who didn't have an in with clan politics looked stunned, at any rate. Talent, looks, career, clan—what would make a nice boy like that kill himself? No one knew him enough to say except for Shisui, and Shisui barely felt like he deserved to be there, standing next to Itachi's flower-strewn corpse. Itachi would have hated them so much, he always hated ostentatious crap like that.

After the funeral, Mikoto invited him to their home for dinner because she was too good a person to let Shisui slump off home by himself, and Shisui hadn't managed to come up with a good excuse in time to get out of it. Dinner was filled with cavernous quiet, Mikoto's red-rimmed eyes as she set out the food and Sasuke's subdued air like a vacuum in place of his usual hyperactive cheer. As they all mumbled _itadakimasu_ over their food, Fugaku met his eyes for one brief moment. Shisui felt a hot surge of anger at the man—Itachi had been his _son_ , how could he have let it happen, how could he have asked Shisui to spy on him, to let either of them get mixed up in this whole stupid fucking mess—but there was no way he could say any of those things in front of Mikoto or Sasuke. He tore his eyes away from Fugaku's stone face instead and picked up his chopsticks with shaking hands. If anyone noticed, no one said anything.

He went home as soon as he could excuse himself, stumping though the compound's dark, dusty streets rather than flashing home. He wandered aimlessly through the gridded buildings, unwilling to go back to his dank flat full of accusations and exhausting dreams. It started raining sometime around midnight, water sluicing down the back of his neck and probably ruining his nice formal clothes forever, but Shisui didn't pay any mind to that. Instead, he remembered abruptly the first time ever he'd convinced Itachi to go running out in the rain with him.

At the time, it had felt like at triumph, getting the perfect genius clan heir to break propriety like that and kick up puddles with him as they played tag under the benevolent eye of storm clouds. By the time he'd followed Itachi home they'd both looked like drowned rats, swimming in the sea of their oversized collars. Instead of being angry, Mikoto had smiled at him and let Shisui take a shower in their house before asking him to stay for dinner while his clothes dried. Fugaku hadn't smiled, but he'd been kind, an indulgent rustle of newsprint. Sasuke had been a not-very-well-behaved baby. Itachi had smiled then, quiet and effortless—and then the memory faded, and Shisui was back where he was: bone tired and bucking for pneumonia. That house, that other downpour, that was as far from where he was as he was from Itachi now.

Every house in the compound was full of his kin, and usually the thought filled him with a rush of protectiveness, a rush of loyalty and duty and pride—but none of it was coming tonight. All he felt was cold, cold cold cold. Blood spooled out of him like a fistful of red ribbons, linking him with the sleepers arrayed around him and they to him, but he felt like the rain had seeped into his bones somehow—now that blood was diluted thin and clear, a wash of fading pink over the cobbled streets, and he didn't know which way he was supposed to turn anymore.

The last time Shisui had felt like this was when his uncle had died. Disconnected and adrift, rudderless over a bleak sea—back then, it had been Itachi who had brought him back to himself. But who was left to bring him back now?

\---

  
The next clan council took place exactly one week after Itachi's funeral. Shisui went because he was expected to, but his heart wasn't in it, not anymore. The smug whispers about obstructions removed and plans moving forward made his skin crawl. He imagined the clan's inner circle choking around the table as Itachi had, flailing at hands that didn't exist, eyes blind to everything but the iron grip about their throats.

All Itachi had wanted was peace. Shisui knew the feeling; he'd lived through the same wars, after all. Maybe Itachi's chosen method had been fucked up, but then again Shisui knew there was no way the coup was stopping now—maybe there'd never been any stopping it at all. Itachi had always favored the long view, but whatever Itachi had foreseen the coup birthing, it had died with him, and a part of Shisui had died with it.

The words mouthed around him stopped making sense, and he studied Fugaku instead, who was sitting exactly opposite. It struck him that Fugaku's stone face wasn't the same as it had been, after all. There was something brittle about it now—as if his core had crumbled, leaving behind only a hollow facade that would crumble at first push. Not for the first time, he wondered why Fugaku had set him on Itachi's tail. It was such a roundabout way of rooting out a traitor, he couldn't possibly have believed Shisui would really be able to catch Itachi out in anything, especially considering he'd forbidden Shisui to use his Doryoku to get the truth. Some of the council hadn't been too happy about that, had they?

Uncle Hayato, who was one of the few and so far removed from Shisui they were only related on paper, clapped a hand to his back. "It must have been hard on you, Shisui-kun," he boomed, meaty paw digging into Shisui's shoulder. "But you've served the clan well. It's a shame Itachi couldn't see things the way you do."

And in that moment, Shisui made a decision.

He stood up abruptly, chair scraping over the council room's rough floor. "Ladies and gentlemen of the council," he announced. Everyone turned to face him, defenses down, and that was all the opening he needed.

\---

  
It was strange, they said later, that Uchiha Shisui. All those traitors in the clan who were planning to overthrow the Hokage—well! Who knew what he'd said to make them confess like that, all at once? And then, well, there was that whole hullaballoo with Danzou afterwards—don't want to speak ill of the dead and all, but no wonder he was so anti-Uchiha, if he was stealing their eyes for himself like that. Good thing that medic-nin found out an told the authorities, eh? At least it all turned out alright in the end, with the peace the Hokage brokered with the Uchiha. We don't need another war in this village, that's for sure.

Really, though, they said, that wasn't even the strangest thing about that Uchiha Shisui. He rooted out traitors and curbed a rebellion, he was a hero! But it was odd, how they found him just weeks shy from the peace's first anniversary—floating facedown in the Nakano River, drowned as a duckling in a downpour. Talent, looks, career, clan—what could possibly make a nice boy like that kill himself?


End file.
